James Rhodes: From the inception of this great nation, deceased veterans have been revered as fallen heroes while, on the other hand, living veterans, in many cases, have been shortchanged and discounted.

Dick Price: If I did it right, the patients — some still wearing old jungle boots or ragged fatigue jackets 20 years down the road — could see that I knew at least some of what they knew about Vietnam. And about drinking, too.

Dick Price: You see the depth of Kovic’s anger–or perhaps it’s his love–that has propelled him through 40 long years of activism, making him a leading antiwar speaker, leading to Saturday’s award, and making him such a valuable voice in stopping this generation’s senseless wars.

Tom Hall: This Memorial Day, the head of the Republican Party has called the 13th Amendment a perversion of our Constitution. The Republican members of the Texas School Book Commission have voted to teach that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was the real hero of the Civil War, and that those Union soldiers died in vain. In Tennessee and here in California, Tea Party candidates are campaigning on a platform plank that the 14th Amendment should not apply to brown children whose parents are immigrants.

Andrea Christina Nill: Though Reid has by no means tabled immigration reform, getting a bill won’t be easy. The legislative calendar is packed and leaves little room for obstacles or distractions. Reid seems confident that he already has 56 votes, but he may be pressed to find the last few supporters he’ll need to get a piece of legislation past cloture. And while his statements seem to have left the prospects for reform unchanged, of more significance might be the fact that Graham was quoted today saying: “immigration is going nowhere this year.”

Last Friday morning, I called Congressman Murtha’s office to communicate my outrage that Murtha, Pelosi, Hoyer and the rest of the House leadership planned to push through another $170-billion dollar Iraq War supplemental, some $70 billion more than Bush requested — all with no timelines or benchmarks or any semblance of accountability or restraint. Murtha’s […]

The Body Politic

Dave Zirin: She is our Jordan. She is our Jim Brown. She is our Babe Ruth, calling his shots. She is no longer content to dodge bullets, but understands how to stop them. Serena is that rare athlete who has not only mastered her sport. She’s harnessed it.